Mnemosyne // Surface Memory

I have always worked in the symbolic and surreal. Long before AI, my painting practice was driven by intuition, recurring symbols, dreams, mythology, and the feeling that images often know where they are going before I do. At the same time, I have always been fascinated by technology and the systems we build to store, transmit, and shape information, from early digital technologies through to the emergence of artificial intelligence. Much of my work sits in the overlap between those two interests: the symbolic and the systemic, the mythic and the technological.

Over the past year, generative AI has become another tool within that exploration. Rather than using it to illustrate predetermined ideas, I use it as part of an iterative creative process. Images are developed through an ongoing dialogue between intuition, art history, mythology, writing, painting, and machine systems. Recurring symbols begin to appear, persist, and evolve. Certain figures return. Certain objects gather meaning. Over time, these fragments accumulate into a larger visual mythology.

This process led to the development of The Sourc.eress, an evolving body of work that explores the convergence of ancient intelligence and artificial intelligence. I became increasingly interested in the idea that mythology and technology are not as different as they first appear. Both are systems for carrying knowledge across time. Both create networks of meaning. Both shape how we understand the world and ourselves.

Mnemosyne // Surface Memory emerged from that ongoing exploration. The work draws on Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the Nine Muses. The marker bearing the number nine references those muses, the forces through which memory becomes poetry, music, story, image, science, and culture. Water appears as a river of memory, while the dark trace moving through it exists somewhere between circuitry, language, and sediment. It carries information toward the muses, where machine logic is transformed into human expression.

For me, the image sits at a threshold. It asks what happens when digital systems enter the same symbolic landscape once occupied by gods, myths, and oral traditions. It is less a statement about AI itself than an exploration of continuity, of how human beings have always created systems to preserve knowledge, and how those systems, in turn, become stories. The Sourc.eress exists within that space, standing between memory and machine, translating one into the language of the other.